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German Study Finds Lockdown ‘Had No Effect’ on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus

A major new study by German scientists at Munich University has found that lockdowns had no effect on reducing the country’s coronavirus infection rate.
Oh.
“Statisticians at Munich University found “no direct connection” between the German lockdown and falling infection rates in the country,” reports <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/03/german-study-finds-lockdown-had-little-effect-virus-infections/amp/">the Telegraph</a>.
The study found that, on all three occasions before Germany imposed its lockdowns in November, December and April, infection rates had already begun to fall.
The R rate – the number that indicates how many other people an infected person passes the virus to – was already under 1 before the lockdown restrictions came into force.
As we <a href="https://summit.news/2020/05/12/leaked-study-from-inside-german-government-warns-lockdown-will-kill-more-people-than-coronavirus/">highlighted</a> last year, a leaked study from inside the German Ministry of the Interior revealed that the impact of the country’s lockdown could end up killing more people than the coronavirus due to victims of other serious illnesses not receiving treatment.
This is by no means the only study to have concluded that lockdowns are completely useless and don’t work.
A peer reviewed study published in January by Stanford researchers <a href="https://summit.news/2021/01/15/peer-reviewed-study-shows-covid-lockdowns-have-no-benefits-compared-to-voluntary-measures/">found</a> that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.
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Back in March, Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya <a href="https://summit.news/2021/03/11/stanford-medical-professor-lockdowns-worst-public-health-mistake-in-last-100-years/">told Newsweek</a> that COVID-19 lockdowns are “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years.”
Earlier this year, academics from Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins <a href="https://summit.news/2021/01/19/duke-harvard-and-johns-hopkins-experts-covid-lockdowns-will-cause-one-million-excess-deaths/">concluded</a> that there could be around a million excess deaths over the next two decades as a result of lockdowns.
Other research has <a href="https://summit.news/2020/05/26/study-lockdown-will-destroy-at-least-seven-times-more-years-of-human-life-than-it-saves/">concluded</a> lockdowns will conservatively “destroy at least seven times more years of human life” than they save.
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source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/german-study-finds-lockdown-had-no-effect-on-stopping-spread-of-coronavirus">https://www.infowars.com/posts/german-study-finds-lockdown-had-no-effect-on-stopping-spread-of-coronavirus</a>

news German Study Finds Lockdown ‘Had No Effect’ on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus

A major new study by German scientists at Munich University has found that lockdowns had no effect on reducing the country’s coronavirus inf...

50-Year-Old Mother Charged With ‘Transphobic Hate Crime’ For Tweeting a Photo of a Suffragette Ribbon

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A 50-year-old mother in Scotland has been charged with a ‘transphobic hate crime’ and faces up to two years in prison after she retweeted an image of a suffragette ribbon.
Yes, really.
Unhinged transgender activists targeted Marion Millar after ludicrously claiming that the ribbon represented a noose. The Scottish feminist drew their ire after campaigning to protect biological women’s spaces and right to express themselves.
“The messages investigated by officers are understood to include a retweeted photograph of a bow of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the Suffragettes, tied around a tree outside the Glasgow studio where a BBC soap opera is shot,” <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/activist-marion-millar-charged-with-sending-homophobic-and-transphobic-tweets-5293jhg6v">reports the Times</a>.
Millar was forced to attend a 2 hour police interview and was subsequently charged under the Malicious Communications Act.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="11.498349834983">
A woman faces two years in prison for tweets.
One was a photo of a suffragette ribbon that was deemed threatening because it supposedly resembled a noose.
So how do we go about repealing these laws that criminalise free expression?<a href="https://t.co/O0zc1ZH98d">https://t.co/O0zc1ZH98d</a>
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) <a href="https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com/status/1400738150889275392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 4, 2021</a>
</blockquote>
After the interview, Millar quoted Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie: “Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.”
“Police and politicians seem to have lost sight of this,” she added.
Millar opposes gender self-identification because she asserts that it makes it easier for male sex predators to hide their intentions.
“Gender identity is a belief. Not a fact. Sex is a fact. Not a belief. The law has no business in transforming facts into beliefs and beliefs into facts,” stated a sign carried by one of Millar’s supporters.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="3.9444444444444">
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WeAreAllMarionMillar?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WeAreAllMarionMillar</a>
Show of support for <a href="https://twitter.com/millar_marion?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@millar_marion</a> this morning! <a href="https://t.co/3zUX36DBEp">pic.twitter.com/3zUX36DBEp</a>
— forwomen.scot (@ForwomenScot) <a href="https://twitter.com/ForwomenScot/status/1400373652009492482?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 3, 2021</a>
</blockquote>
“Women won’t wheesht (shut up),” Calder said. “These charges are a fundamental attack on our human rights. We still have the right to free thought and the ability to speak our minds.”
One extremist trans activist responded to Millar being charged by tweeting a picture of a gun with the words, “Making a nice list of terfs tweeting @WomenWontWheesht because she needs target practice” (because they’re such nice people and all).
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="12.518105849582">
While Marion Millar is being questioned by the police for refusing to accept gender ideology…
…this profile fantasises about killing women, complete with gun imagery & then jokes about how scared they feel & laughs about being reported to the police.
Who is oppressed again? <a href="https://t.co/gmojMSp37o">pic.twitter.com/gmojMSp37o</a>
— gender is harmful (@genderisharmful) <a href="https://twitter.com/genderisharmful/status/1400411374895906817?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 3, 2021</a>
</blockquote>
The United Kingdom, where legally protected free speech is now virtually non-existent, is notorious for arresting people for tweets simply on the basis that some offended idiot who identifies as ‘LGBT’ complained about it.
After contacting his employers, Humberside Police <a href="https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/humberside-police-twitter-transgender-limerick-2468385">interrogated a man</a> and told him to “check his thinking” after he posted a limerick that offended a transgender person.
Harry Miller told police he did not write the limerick and merely retweeted it, but was told by an officer, “Ah. But you liked it and promoted it. It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident.”
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source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/50-year-old-mother-charged-with-transphobic-hate-crime-for-tweeting-a-photo-of-a-suffragette-ribbon">https://www.infowars.com/posts/50-year-old-mother-charged-with-transphobic-hate-crime-for-tweeting-a-photo-of-a-suffragette-ribbon</a>

news 50-Year-Old Mother Charged With ‘Transphobic Hate Crime’ For Tweeting a Photo of a Suffragette Ribbon

A 50-year-old mother in Scotland has been charged with a ‘transphobic hate crime’ and faces up to two years in prison after she retweeted a...

A weed dealer in NYC on how legalization could affect his business

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Jeff, a weed dealer who’s been active in New York for six years, read the news during a morning bathroom trip. Suddenly, it was a brand new world. On April 30, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that made the production, possession, and use of recreational cannabis legal in New York City. By 2022, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/new-york-marijuana-legalization-facts.html">New York Times speculates</a>, dispensaries will begin to propagate throughout the metro area, ushering in the downfall of one of the last major dominoes in prohibition. New York joins 22 other states that have fully authorized marijuana, and currently there are only six states — Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina — that maintain an outright ban on all CBD or THC commodities, medicinal or otherwise.
Jeff, who is being referred to by a pseudonym for this story to protect his privacy, knows that his job doesn’t carry nearly the same risks as some of his peers in the field. He is white, and tells me that law enforcement is far more likely to be lenient on him and his business than other dealers in more surveilled neighborhoods in the city. <a href="https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers">The American Civil Liberties Union reports</a> that Black Americans are nearly four times as likely to be arrested on marijuana charges as white Americans. But the prohibition rollback still has Jeff, and many of his friends, considering all the anxieties and possibilities of the future. Could he go legit? Should he go legit?
Maybe he has a real chance to break ground on his very own cannabis delivery app or a brick-and-mortar emporium, and to reach a much higher economic ceiling in the process. Or maybe instead, a swath of moneyed investors will end up descending on the city to lobby the state assembly, and will dump a bureau’s worth of paperwork on top of the independent dealers. If the financialized weed sector slowly squeezes out the, uh, “mom-and-pop shops”? Everything could change.
Jeff learned everything about his business from his mother, who’s spent her career running a small wine retailer. She’s nurtured great relationships with vineyards and her clientele, while building a true community around her storefront. The same mindset can be easily applied to his work, Jeff tells me. Weed is an industry about people and connections, just as much as it’s about the product. We talked about how that system is threatened by private equity, the dysfunctionality of the underground trade, and how much longer he sees himself in the cannabis hustle.
So how long have you been selling weed?
I got into the game when I was 13 or 14, and I moved to New York in 2013. For the first year or two I wasn’t really dealing, but I got back in around 2015 for a number of different cannabis delivery services. But for the past few years, I’ve been working independently.
Was it hard breaking into the industry up here in New York?
In the city, you can get anything you want. The hardest thing for me up here is filling out your clientele. Anyone with five grand in their pocket can start dealing. It’s not hard to do. It’s about how you want to cultivate your business. But you can’t advertise yourself — not until recently, I guess, on Craigslist. But accessibility has never been an issue.
When the news broke, did you have a clear idea of what exactly was legal in the city? Weed legalization can be pretty confusing sometimes.
It’s changed a lot. They’ll put one thing on the docket, and people will hear all these rumors, and that’s not what ultimately passes. I don’t think the general public has easy access to that kind of information. I think that’s intentional, too. I don’t think the police department wants people to know all the rules. They like that gray area. But I encourage people to go on the NYPD website and read what you’re legally allowed to carry and where you’re allowed to smoke when the new law is passed.
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From your conversation with other people in the business, what’s the consensus opinion about it?
It’s definitely long overdue. I have a lot of friends who’ve had bad encounters with the law. It depends on the cop you get, or the judge, and all sorts of factors. But if you’re dealing with strictly cannabis charges, it’s usually just a slap on the wrist. If you’re high enough up, you don’t worry about the legal ramifications as much. You have a lawyer or a retainer. A lot of these guys have been in the business for 20 or 30 years. They know what they’re doing. That isn’t the worry. Instead, people are talking about the capital. You have customers who are curious. They want to go into dispensaries and see the options. There’s a novelty of going into a brick-and-mortar location and purchasing something that’s been so taboo for so long. But I did that in California, and when I got back in the car, I was like, “How the hell did I spend that much money?”
A lot of my business partners, and the people I work with, we’ve developed our own customers. We’ve developed our own family and relationships with them. Think of restaurants — that’s how I like to compare it. In New York, you can have a block with five or six restaurants, and some make it and some don’t. How do you make it? What’s your niche, who’s your clientele? But the shops that are gonna open might be able to go for five or six years without making a profit because they have the investors that are willing to fund that. It’ll be huge for tourism, but I think if you live in New York, you’re gonna want deals, you’re gonna want to establish relationships, and you’re not going to want to go into a Circuit City-type dispensary.
Have you thought about ramping up your own advertising efforts? Would you be open to posting on Craigslist?
Personally, I’m not interested in expanding and taking on new clients. I’ve got a close-knit network, and a bit of a waiting list. It’s not something that I’m worried about. But I’ve given it a lot of thought. I know of 15 different delivery services operating in Brooklyn right now, and they all talk to each other because they like to source from the same growers. If someone runs out of a certain strain … again, back to my restaurant metaphor. If the restaurant across the street has their ice machine break, and they run over to you to borrow a couple buckets of ice, you’re not going to say no. It’s better business for you later on when your ice machine breaks. When I think about those guys trying to expand, all of the money is going to need to go into app design. You’ll need a team. And if you don’t have some serious investors backing you, you’re looking at a lot of money.
Could you see that for yourself? Now that prohibition is over, could you see yourself growing your business into an app-based, or even brick-and-mortar-based, legit business? Or are you happy with how things are now?
I’ve gotten into the dirty side of the business. It was an illegal infrastructure, so there’s no checks and balances. I’ve had guys steal $30,000 from me. I’ve been in debt. One business was using my credit line and said they weren’t paying the bill. What do you do? You’re not gonna call the cops. Now that things are becoming legal, there are still just as many ugly demons that will raise their heads.
In an ideal world, where I could put together my dream team of people, I’d give it a shot. But the way I’ve seen things go with these Fortune 500 companies, something toxic is going to get involved.
My mom runs a wine shop. She’s sold wine for 30 years. I base my entire business model on what she taught me. She worked with wine wholesalers for the first 15 years, and she made a lot of awesome connections with vineyard owners. With her own private enterprise and those connections, she was able to beat Costco or Total Wines or whatever. That’s what I’m going to be able to do. I’ve got an awesome clientele base, and connections to my growers. It’s a mom-and-pop shop. Let’s keep America authentic.
Do you expect to be in cannabis long term?
The world is all opportunity. I didn’t see myself staying in it this long. I use cannabis. I medicate for anxiety. As soon as I had access to cannabis and could smoke independently of the confines of what’s taboo, it really helped me a lot. I’ve made a lot of friends along the way. A good percentage of my customers are hospital patients or the elderly. It really does help a lot of people, and there’s not a lot of access to it — even medicinally. I never intend to stop helping those close to me. Eventually, I’d prefer to set up something that can stay in place and run itself. But at the end of the day, it’s a job. You retire. Everyone has an endgame in sight.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22517374/weed-dealer-interview-legalization-ny">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22517374/weed-dealer-interview-legalization-ny</a>

vox A weed dealer in NYC on how legalization could affect his business

Jeff, a weed dealer who’s been active in New York for six years, read the news during a morning bathroom trip. Suddenly, it was a brand new...

The fastest way to get more people to buy electric vehicles

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Whether the United States can get to net-zero emissions by 2050 hinges hugely on our love of cars: They’re the dominant mode of transportation in America — ridership on trains, buses, and other public transit pales in comparison.
Other transportation options are limited, and cars are ingrained in American culture. This makes switching to electric vehicles an attractive way to decarbonize. But in order to encourage more people to buy electric vehicles (EVs), the US needs a better charging station infrastructure.
That is a key part of President Joe Biden’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/">American Jobs Plan</a>, which proposes spending $174 billion on EVs, a sum that would boost supply chains for automakers, help subsidize the cost of cars for American drivers, and dramatically scale up the number of public electric vehicle charging stations along the nation’s roadways.
There are currently about <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&country=US">42,490 public charging EV stations</a> in the US, counting Level 2 chargers (taking about an hour of charging for 10 to 20 miles of range), and DC Fast chargers (taking about 20 minutes of charging for 60 to 80 miles of range). In comparison, there are about 115,000 gas stations in the US, most of which have multiple pumps.
Biden’s plan would increase the number of charging stations more than tenfold by establishing grant and incentive programs for state and local governments and private companies to build 500,000 charging stations around America’s highways and in hard-to-reach communities by the year 2030. With a number of US carmakers pledging to go totally electric by 2035, that buildout could make EV charging ports as ubiquitous as gas pumps.
At the moment, there aren’t enough reliable charging stations to accommodate a sudden increase in EV usage. About 627,000 plug-in EVs were bought in 2019 and 2020, and demand is expected to increase — especially as carmakers phase out gas-powered cars.
“We’re so much better off than we were even five years ago ... but we still have a huge gap,” a Biden administration official told Vox. “This is an essential piece of the shift to EVs and it’s not going to happen on its own.”
Transitioning American car drivers to electric vehicles is a crucial piece of the Biden administration’s overall plan to get the United States on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as its <a href="https://www.vox.com/22397364/earth-day-us-climate-change-summit-biden-john-kerry-commitment-2030-zero-emissions">more immediate goal</a> of limiting catastrophic climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030.
The US is the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China, and cars are a big part of that. Transportation emissions account for <a href="https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions">29 percent of total US greenhouse gas emissions</a> (more than the electricity sector and industry), and light-duty vehicles like cars account for the vast majority of transportation emissions — <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport#:~:text=Road%20travel%20accounts%20for%20three,comes%20from%20trucks%20carrying%20freight.&text=International%20shipping%20contributes%20a%20similar%20amount%2C%20at%2010.6%25.">close to 60 percent</a>, as of 2018.
Getting EV charging stations to be as ubiquitous as gas stations would help change that, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Even more important is increasing the availability and access for home and work charging stations — where experts believe most people will ultimately charge their cars.
“Home charging is the most important; that’s where the highest number of charging [stations] will be needed,” said Scott Hardman, a researcher studying hybrids and EVs at the University of California Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. “It’s the cheapest; it’s the most convenient.”
In addition to building public charging stations, the Biden administration plans to propose expanding tax credits for private infrastructure for home EV chargers, giving people an incentive to install them. This is key, experts told me; making charging station access equitable — ensuring they are affordable and accessible — is as important as increasing the total number of charging stations.
Both are doable but will take serious government investment. But as with the rest of Biden’s agenda, the fate of this proposed network of charging stations could hinge on the fate of bipartisan infrastructure negotiations and whether the president decides to pass his plan with only Democratic votes.
Because gas stations are the most common method of refueling cars in the United States, powering up electric vehicles might call to mind clusters of charging stations next to convenience stores next to a highway or road.
But the two modes of powering up are fundamentally different. For one thing, driving into a gas station, filling up, and driving out typically takes just a few minutes.
The fastest EV charging stations — like DC Fast — on the other hand, take up to 20 minutes to charge enough to power the vehicle to a 60- to 80-mile range. Some state and city planners and EV experts are working on putting charging stations outside of restaurants, grocery stores, and shops, so that people can go off and eat a meal or shop while their car is refueling.
“Most charging, we would hope and expect, is happening while people are doing something else,” said Eric Wood, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences. “The idea that charging is happening slowly can be convenient for the driver as well as the grid.”
More rapid charging technology is being developed, but the vast majority of available public charging stations currently in the US are the more sluggish Level 2 chargers, which require far more time to get to a full charge. There are just <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&country=US&ev_levels=dc_fast">5,141 DC Fast chargers in the US</a>, with big gaps in parts of the Midwest and Mountain West, according to the Energy Department’s <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&country=US&ev_levels=dc_fast">map of charging stations</a>.
“If your battery’s down to 20 percent, you’re going to have to stay plugged in for hours and hours,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, the former chief global economist at Ford Motor Company, now a senior resident fellow at Third Way.
The lack of charging infrastructure can mean headaches for drivers going on road trips, who need to plan their route to hit available charging stations. An <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftoday.yougov.com%2Ftopics%2Fconsumer%2Farticles-reports%2F2020%2F10%2F23%2Fwhats-stopping-americans-buying-electric-cars&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F22463219%2Felectric-vehicles-charging-station-infrastructure" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588\u0026xs=1\u0026url=https://today.yougov.com/topics/consumer/articles-reports/2020/10/23/whats-stopping-americans-buying-electric-cars\u0026referrer=vox.com\u0026sref=https://www.vox.com/22463219/electric-vehicles-charging-station-infrastructure\u0026xcust=___vx__p_22227260__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://today.yougov.com/topics/consumer/articles-reports/2020/10/23/whats-stopping-americans-buying-electric-cars","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/22463219/electric-vehicles-charging-station-infrastructure","xcust":"___vx__p_22227260__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>October 2020 poll from YouGov</a> found that charging time, hassle of charging, and cost of charging at home were all top reasons buyers who were looking for a new car weren’t considering an electric vehicle.
As climate expert and activist Bill McKibben recently found while on a road trip from Vermont to Boston, if you’re in need of some juice and another driver is already using a public charger, you could be in for a nerve-wracking drive home.
“The plug was in use once more, so I swallowed hard, did a little math, and drove on, arriving home with red lights flashing on the dashboard and a display indicating that my range was down to two miles,” McKibben <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/your-electric-vehicle-cant-get-there-from-here-at-least-not-without-a-charge">recently wrote in the New Yorker</a>.
Competition and congestion around EV charging stations has gotten particularly bad in cities like San Francisco, where there’s a growing number of electric car drivers. (The places with the <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/electric_vehicle_charging_infrastructure_trends_third_quarter_2020.pdf">highest density of charging stations</a> per 100,000 people are Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Washington, DC.)
“In San Francisco, there’s a huge congestion problem, and there are simply not enough plugs for EVs in that metro area,” said Hughes-Cromwick. “There is congestion in areas where EV demand has flourished. If we don’t get going on this, we will have roadblocks, especially for longer trips.”
Another complication is that some electric car companies like Tesla — frustrated at the lack of investment in EV charging stations — have built out their own networks of superchargers that are only compatible with their cars. So if a driver of a Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf is running low on battery and the only charger around is a Tesla, they’re out of luck.
The White House official I spoke to told me that any federal investment in EV charging stations will require universal chargers that can work with the full range of electric vehicles on the market.
“It’s been incredibly important for Tesla to have done that buildout, but we’re thinking about this investment as chargers that can support any vehicle,” the official said. “It’s very clear it needs to be accessible for any driver of an EV.”
That accessibility — along with the sheer number the White House hopes will be built — ought to, in theory, eliminate lines and congestion around chargers, while also ensuring charging is affordable. One thing it won’t do is solve the problem of charging times, but charging companies are developing faster chargers, and the second part of the White House’s proposal hopes to address that issue as well.
The most common and easiest way to charge an electric car doesn’t necessarily happen alongside a roadway; an at-home charging station “ends up for a lot of Americans being the only place they’d need to charge on a regular basis,” said Wood.
Home charging is especially convenient for people who primarily use their electric car for short trips around their town or city; especially if a car has a 200- to 300-mile range, that could get them a couple of days or weeks on a single charge. This is important because Americans do the vast majority of their driving for short trips: Nearly <a href="https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips">77 percent of vehicles</a> drove distances of 10 miles or less per trip, according to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (the most recent available). In other words, it’s <a href="https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips">far more often</a> that we’re driving home, to work, or to run an errand than going on a long road trip.
Home charging may be the most convenient, but home charging is also typically relegated to higher-income people who can actually afford to charge from within their home. For lower-income people who don’t have a garage or a dedicated parking spot with easy access to a charger, the logistics of charging at home become much more complicated.
Just as policymakers are figuring out how to make EVs cheaper, experts told me that any expansion of charging stations needs to focus on how to make home charging more equitable and accessible for middle- and lower-income people.
One option is getting more charging stations on residential streets, powered by the same electrical lines for street lights. This was <a href="https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/1300-street-lights-converted-ev-chargers-london?a=JMA06&t%5B0%5D=Siemens&t%5B1%5D=Ubitricity&t%5B2%5D=electric%20vehicle&t%5B3%5D=charging%20infrastructure&t%5B4%5D=London&curl=1#:~:text=A%20major%20residential%20road%20in,not%20have%20off-street%20parking.">piloted in London</a> in 2020, with a number of street lights converted. But this is a relatively small project, and it hasn’t been adopted widely yet in other countries. Another option is increasing the number of charging stations at people’s workplaces, giving them another place to charge while their car is parked for hours.
“Everyone parks their car somewhere at night; that’s where we need to get the charging to,” said Hardman. “We have to be careful it’s not just the privileged households that get the lower running costs.”
The Biden administration official told Vox that the president’s infrastructure plan is proposing an extended or expanded tax credit to expand private infrastructure like charging stations at home.
“There’s an outsize public role for that infrastructure,” the official said. “You have to have a mix of home charging, workplace, and public.”
Overall, Biden’s goal is to make EVs more attractive in large part by making charging more convenient. But it will take significant government investment for Biden’s desired 500,000-EV network to become a reality.
Getting a bipartisan group of lawmakers — particularly in the Senate, where Democrats need 10 Republican votes to pass legislation under normal rules — to agree to spend nearly $200 billion on EVs won’t be easy, as prolonged infrastructure negotiations have shown. But the US will need to make this change in order to meet its climate commitments, and to decrease its contribution to climate change.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22463219/electric-vehicles-charging-station-infrastructure">https://www.vox.com/22463219/electric-vehicles-charging-station-infrastructure</a>

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When Will Covid Pandemic Really End? What Covax Says

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Covax is struggling to get hold of vaccines, which means the world won't return to normal anytime soon
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On Jan. 23, 2020, the day the novel coronavirus forced the Chinese city of Wuhan into lockdown, two American doctors named Seth Berkley and Richard Hatchett met at the bar of the Hard Rock Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, to talk about vaccines.
At that point it wasn't clear how soon, or even whether, effective vaccines for the disease caused by the virus could be developed. But Berkley, an epidemiologist who runs Gavi, a nonprofit that delivers immunizations to poor countries, was thinking about how the crisis would unfold if the virus swept across the globe. Hatchett, chief executive officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, had just handed out research grants to three vaccine candidates. The two men were in Davos for the World Economic Forum, where public health organizations often go to drum up support and funding. Hatchett was concerned the world could see a repeat of the mistakes made during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, when wealthy countries cornered the market for vaccines. (The fallout was limited; H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than feared.) He and Berkley agreed about the urgent need to raise money for vaccines even before they existed, so poor countries didn't get left behind in a stampede for doses.
A month later, Berkley flew to Seattle to meet with Bill Gates, who'd helped establish Gavi two decades earlier with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Melinda. Gavi was designed to fix what was perceived as a failure of the market: Pharmaceutical companies lacked a financial incentive to provide vaccines to poorer countries at affordable prices. Gavi attempts to counter that by pooling both demand and money, which puts it in a position to give manufacturers large, long-term contracts. Gavi has now helped vaccinate more than 800 million children against pneumonia, meningitis, and a range of other diseases, preventing an estimated 14 million deaths with routine immunizations. Over breakfast, Berkley and Gates discussed how the Gavi model might be used if scientists succeeded in the search for vaccines against the disease, by then called Covid-19.
Over the next few months, Berkley and Hatchett, backed by Gates, the European Union, and others, developed the Covax Facility, a public-private partnership Gavi manages with CEPI and the World Health Organization. It's now raised more than $10 billion as it aims to deliver 1.8 billion doses to more than 90 lower-income economies by early 2022.
But Covax is struggling to get hold of vaccines, which means the world won't return to normal anytime soon. So far, it's been able to deliver about 78 million shots, or 4% of the 1.95 billion doses administered globally. At every turn, it's been stymied by pharmaceutical companies drawing out negotiations and countries hoarding doses and raw materials. Most recently, Covax has been buffeted by an export ban imposed by the world's biggest vaccine producer, India, which is experiencing a devastating second wave of Covid. As a result, it will reach the midpoint of the year about 190 million doses short of where it expected to be.
In the U.S., about half the population has gotten one dose, while in low-income countries it's 0.7%. Berkley acknowledges the inevitability of governments insisting on vaccinating their own populations first. But many nations are now in a position to share surplus doses - and they're doing it at a pace he finds exasperating. "The goal should be to get to whatever level we need to end the acute phase of the pandemic," he says. "Wealthy countries have ordered many times the amount of doses they need. It's really time now to turn that around and either begin to make doses available through sharing or to free up places in the manufacturing queue to allow doses to go across the world."
Some wealthy countries are beginning to kick doses Covax's way. President Joe Biden announced in mid-May that by June, the U.S. would share 20 million doses from Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer, in addition to a stockpile of up to 60 million shots of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which still hasn't been authorized in the U.S. On June 3, the White House said it will send 25 million vaccines to countries around the world, including 19 million doses through Covax and another 6 million directly to countries including Mexico and South Korea, bypassing the global alliance because of "regional priorities." The sharing of AstraZeneca doses remains on hold pending regulatory approval.Countries operating under the banner Team Europe have pledged to donate 100 million doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of the year, mostly through Covax. On June 2, at a virtual summit hosted by Japan, the alliance raised almost $2.4 billion and secured pledges of another 54 million doses. All of that is welcome, but will barely make a dent in plugging the immediate supply gap.
The U.S., now vaccinating children as young as 12, is in a position to immunize more than 300 million people by the end of June. Meanwhile, Covax is still scrounging. "That is very difficult to watch," Hatchett says. At the current pace of immunization, it will take until the middle of next year to achieve a high level of global immunity and bring the pandemic under control.
As cases in the U.S. and Europe decline and vaccines there become plentiful, Berkley says it's dangerous to think anyone is safe. "If there are large populations with virus circulating, what's going to happen is we're going to have new variants," he warns. "We're going to have continued evolution of the virus, and that's just going to come right back and threaten the U.S. as well as the rest of the world."
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At its most basic, Covax was set up to fend off what Berkley calls the threat of a "free-for-all, Lord of the Flies" situation. The idea was to provide free doses to low-income countries while at the same time allowing wealthy and middle-income countries to buy into a portfolio of vaccines as a way of spreading their bets in the early days when no one knew which shot might work. Covax's large purchasing pool would secure deals with pharma companies at good prices. Developing countries would get vaccines at the same time as wealthier countries, with the doses distributed in proportion to population size. Health-care workers and the most vulnerable would go first. Only after 20% of populations were protected would the allocation formula start prioritizing countries based on a higher risk of Covid infections. If wealthier countries had relied primarily on Covax, instead of striking their own deals with pharma companies, they would have immunized younger people more slowly, so that vaccines could be distributed fairly, regardless of case rates.
Berkley's greatest fear was that rich governments would strike multiple bilateral deals with vaccine developers, sucking up supplies -and that's exactly what they did. "On that we failed miserably," he says. "There was a period of time when there weren't as many bilaterals, but obviously there's lots now."
It might have been wishful thinking to bet that a newfangled "facility" could secure cut-price doses from pharma companies and large donations from strapped governments during the worst pandemic in a century. It's probably fantasy to imagine the U.S. or Europe - two of the hottest hot spots during much of the crisis - handing over domestically produced doses early on and giving up the chance to lift lockdowns, get kids off remote learning, and revive moribund economies. But the decision cost lives elsewhere: Health-care workers and the elderly were left unprotected. Hatchett calls the situation an example of the "prisoner's dilemma," the game theory concept in which individuals, acting to protect their own interests, produce a worse outcome for everyone.
The U.S. didn't join Covax under Donald Trump. Instead, it launched Operation Warp Speed, which spent more than $12 billion to finance a portfolio of vaccine candidates. It was an enormous success; the funding helped scientists deliver shots faster than anyone expected. Berkley and Hatchett say Covax could have achieved something similar if it had had that kind of money early on - it could have, for example, done what a number of countries did and placed a large order in the fall with Pfizer, which produced the first vaccine to be U.S.- approved and didn't take money from Operation Warp Speed for research and development. "Every political leader is trying to think about how they can deal with their own problems," Berkley says. "We have to get everybody in the world to understand that if we're going to deal with a global pandemic, we need a global solution."
Most pharma companies didn't prioritize Covax. In January, Pfizer Inc. agreed to sell it 40 million doses - at the time, less than 2% of its expected production in 2021. Most of those doses won't arrive until the second half of the year. In early May, after months of negotiations, Moderna reached a deal to sell as many as 500 million doses to Covax, but they won't start arriving until October or later and the vast majority will be delivered in 2022. The pricing on these deals is opaque, but cost obviously has been a problem for Covax. "We prefer not to put prices out, because it affects our negotiations with other companies," Berkley says, adding that terms will be disclosed at a later date. Pfizer said in May that it expects about $26 billion in revenue from its Covid vaccine this year. Moderna has projected more than $19 billion in revenue from its shot. For now, Covax remains heavily dependent on AstraZeneca, which has pledged to sell its vaccine for no profit and struck an early deal with the alliance. The AstraZeneca vaccine accounts for about 95% of the doses the group has distributed.
The U.S. said it would join Covax on the second day of the Biden presidency and now ranks as its single biggest donor. More than 190 governments are on board, including dozens of higher-income economies that signed up to use the alliance to buy doses. Arguably the most complex international peacetime operation ever attempted, Covax could serve as a template for responding to future pandemics. Berkley and his deputy at Gavi, Aurelia Nguyen, the managing director of Covax, are working with an alphabet soup of organizations to steer it. The WHO is advising where doses should go, helping countries get ready, and clearing vaccines for safety and efficacy. The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) is helping with procurement, logistics, and storage. CEPI is backing research.
India's mismanagement of the pandemic is Covax's biggest headache at the moment. With the help of the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, the country was supposed to use its status as the "pharmacy of the world" to supply doses to poorer countries at low cost. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, via Gavi, gave Serum $300 million to expand manufacturing capacity for Astra's shot and another from Novavax Inc., which is likely to be approved in the coming months. Serum had planned to reserve half of its production for India and export millions of doses to Covax. In total it expected to produce 1 billion shots in 2021. It will likely fall short of its target.
In January, while cases were low, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory against the pandemic. That pronouncement contributed to a slow uptake of vaccines among Indians; only about 3% of the population is fully vaccinated. When the surge in infections started in the country in March, there was a spike in demand for doses, leading the government to all but stop Serum's deliveries to other nations. CEO Adar Poonawalla said in mid-May that exports are unlikely to resume until the end of the year. Covax has been working with AstraZeneca to source doses from other suppliers and announced an agreement on May 21 to buy 200 million Johnson & Johnson doses, to be delivered by the end of the year. But the pitfalls of depending too much on production from a single country have been exposed dramatically.
The shortfalls have created panic in many countries counting on Covax for their vaccination campaigns, along with resentment at wealthy nations that are swimming in vaccines. "We're taking a tremendous amount of pressure and heat from countries that are understandably frustrated and angry about the inequity of distribution they see," Hatchett says. In some cases, wealthy countries have a glut of vaccines because they used Covax as it was designed - they bought into the portfolio as an insurance policy. Many of them also kicked in cash to finance doses for poor nations. But they're largely topping up their supplies - Canada, for example, is sitting on tens of thousands of Astra doses because of concerns it could cause rare blood clots. That doesn't sit well where doses are scarce.
On Feb. 24, the first shipment of Covax vaccines touched down in Accra, Ghana: 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute, arriving from Mumbai via Dubai. It was more than two months after the first Covid vaccine was administered in the U.K.
One hot day in mid-March, Anthony Annan, a 78-year-old retired civil servant, rode 5 kilometers in uncomfortable public vans to a vaccination site in the eastern part of the city in search of a vaccine. The frail man arrived exhausted. Supported by his tripod walking stick, he pulled out a white handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead before approaching an official. "Hello, madam, can you help me get my Covid vaccination?" he asked in a shaky voice. The response was simple: "Sorry, sir, we have run out of vaccines."
Two weeks later, Annan returned with his 69-year-old wife and 91-year-old mother-in-law, and all three got their first doses. "The fear of contracting this deadly disease has subsided," he said after getting his shot, the relief in his voice palpable. "We will sleep a little better tonight." With all the supply disruptions, however, he still hasn't gotten his second dose.
There's a wrinkle in the story, one that speaks to Covax's delicate balancing act: Ghana had, and still has, an exceedingly low prevalence of Covid. Should its doses have been sent to, say, Brazil, where the virus was surging? Or was it more important to protect health-care workers and the elderly in Ghana, in case it became the next Brazil, something that was possible though not certain? Covax takes the latter approach. The program's critics say that's both ethically and medically wrong. In a May 25 opinion piece in the New York Times, Ezekiel Emanuel and Govind Persad, a doctor and lawyer, respectively, wrote, "True, every country needs vaccines in the pandemic. But those needs are not equally urgent."
Berkley says protecting health-care workers worldwide should be a top priority, and using vaccines to fight surging infections isn't as straightforward as it looks. "We've learned from many other pandemics, if you say, 'I'm going to go to the places that have the highest disease incidence,' those may be countries on the top of the curve and on their way down," he says. "The most efficient places you'd want to be is on their way up the curve, because that's where you can get the maximum preventative effects of a vaccine."
The fallout from India's export ban is being felt acutely in countries that are suddenly facing spiraling infection rates. Nepal received 348,000 doses from Covax on March 7, the first of more than 1.9 million the alliance initially planned to deliver. It's now grappling with a surge of cases spilling across its border with India, and no more Covax doses have arrived. "It was an incredible sign of hope, that this is the beginning of the end," Elke Wisch, Unicef's representative in Nepal, says of the first Covax delivery. "And now here we are just weeks later. The situation is definitely worse than it has been at any time so far in the pandemic."
Covax is now negotiating with Chinese developers as it tries to make up for the loss of supplies from India. China has shipped more doses than all other countries combined, through deals with individual nations, typically places where it wants to secure more influence. Pivoting to provide doses to Covax - China is a member - would signal a shift. The WHO recently authorized vaccines by the Sinopharm Group Co. and Sinovac Biotech Ltd., opening the door for the companies to supply the global alliance.
Critics say the world would be in a much better place if Covax had put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to waive patent protections and allow more manufacturers to produce vaccines by transferring their technology. In October, South Africa and India asked the World Trade Organization to allow a temporary waiver of intellectual-property protections on Covid vaccines. The proposal has gained support from more than 100 countries, and on May 5 the Biden administration announced it would support the waiver. That made a splash, but countries such as the U.K. and Germany remain opposed, making it hard to see how it will move ahead. The EU instead has said it might allow the use of compulsory licenses to make vaccines in times of crisis, but that remains a vague proposal at best.
A coalition of nonprofits called the People's Vaccine Alliance continues to push for patent waivers and to criticize Covax's mainstream, working-within-the-system approach. "Covax is a welcome but inadequate charitable model," says Anna Marriott, health policy manager for Oxfam International, a member of the alliance. "They were never challenging the system. They're just a purchaser within the system. They managed to raise a tremendous amount of money, but they could have unlocked a bigger supply."
Is that the case? The past year has made it painfully clear that Covax doesn't even have the leverage to get the doses it needs, let alone to persuade companies to hand over formulas for making vaccines. As to equipping a fleet of new manufacturers, Berkley says there aren't enough raw materials or people with the know-how to get new producers up to speed. Before the pandemic, the world had the capacity to make about 5 billion vaccines annually, including roughly 1.5 billion flu shots; manufacturers are trying to more than double that rate. If the sharing of technical knowledge is going to increase, governments will have to help. "We need to do everything we can to ensure that not only intellectual property but also knowledge is shared as widely as possible," Berkley says. "We welcome any intervention that accelerates this process."
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, argues there will be too much vaccine production capacity by next year. Even if that's true, more money is needed to inoculate the world. The returns are potentially enormous. The International Monetary Fund estimates that investing $50 billion in global vaccine delivery would generate an additional $9 trillion in economic growth by 2025. Some of that funding could help countries struggling with vaccination programs. According to a World Bank report in March, fewer than a third of the poorest nations had systems to train the large number of people needed to administer vaccines or public strategies to spur people to get them. That, combined with vaccine hesitancy, has meant that doses in some places are going bad.
Covax couldn't prevent the free-for-all Berkley worried about. There's still a yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots. But the prospects of ending the crisis would look grim without it. "Tell me which other organization has tried to bite the bullet here," says Klaus Stohr, a virologist and former WHO official who played a key role in mounting the response to SARS in 2003. "Which other organization has been so ambitious that they are promising to do everything that it takes to give a vaccine to those who cannot afford it? There is no other one."
Even countries that cut bilateral deals with pharma companies and paid only lip service to notions of vaccine equity are beginning to recognize that they need Covax to end the pandemic. Where pleas about equity didn't work, appeals to self-interest are powerful. No one is safe until everyone is safe, as Berkley has been saying for more than a year.
One clear need in the future, he argues, is a ready pool of funds to be rapidly deployed to invest in vaccines and therapeutics. Hatchett has outlined a $3.5 billion plan to fight future pandemics, including building a "library of vaccines" targeting different virus families using technologies advanced during the Covid race.
An independent panel set up last year by the WHO to advise on preparing for future pandemics came up with similar conclusions in a report released in May. The panel proposed the creation of an International Pandemic Financing Facility to secure as much as $10 billion a year to bankroll preparedness measures, including vaccines. This facility would be overseen by a newly created Global Health Threats Council led by heads of state. The panel also recommended "shifting from a model where innovation is left to the market to a model aimed at delivering global public goods," by requiring companies to share technology and provide licenses to manufacturers when government funds are invested in research.
The Covid vaccines are a triumph, but banking on more triumphs as a bulwark against future pandemics would be madness. That, say Berkley and Hatchett, is why it's crucial to put an equitable financing model in place. "We're lucky, because the vaccines have been successful," Berkley says. "But we could be in a situation with a much more difficult pathogen. We might have to try many different products, and many of them might fail. That would be an even bigger challenge."
- With Ekow Dontoh and Josh Wingrove
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/covax-the-worlds-best-hope-to-end-the-pandemic-still-needs-more-doses-2456241">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/covax-the-worlds-best-hope-to-end-the-pandemic-still-needs-more-doses-2456241</a>

news world When Will Covid Pandemic Really End? What Covax Says

Covax is struggling to get hold of vaccines, which means the world won't return to normal anytime soon On Jan. 23, 2020, the day the...